“Well, I think that’s everything,” Lebrun said with a happy air of wrapping things up. “And now, perhaps—”

  “Did you work with him in France too?” I asked, to keep him going.

  “No, in France I was an official in city government. But the Occupation made a big mess for everybody, and afterward, when things settled down, we both ended up here in Barcelona. Marcel first opened a small shop not far from here, but it wasn’t successful. He knew antiques inside out, but he had no patience, you see. To do business with him, a person had to know exactly what he was looking for and how much he was willing to pay. No small talk, no bargaining. That was all right in France, but not here in Spain. Me, I know about negotiating, about buttering up customers, but what did I know about coins, and silver, and jewelry? Well, I remembered him from Veaudry, of course, and suggested we get together. Since then……..well, look around you.” He puffed up a little more.

  What I saw around me was a mess, but I couldn’t deny that it seemed like a thriving operation. “It’s very impressive,” I said.

  Mrs. Aguilar came in carrying a tray holding two demitasse cups of coffee and set them before us. There was a manila folder under her arm. “Would you like milk or sugar?” she asked me kindly. “A pastry?” I got the impression that she’d taken to me, as I had to her.

  “No, thanks, this is fine.” I took a sip of the hot, thick brew and made an appreciative noise.

  Lebrun was looking at the folder the way a nervous taxpayer looks at an audit notice from the IRS. “What is that?”

  “There are some problems with the invoices from Gottfried and Vilas,” she said to Lebrun in French, not Spanish, presumably as a courtesy to me so that I wouldn’t think they were talking in secret.

  His trepidation increased. “What’s wrong now, for God’s sake?”

  Leaning over his shoulder she spread the manila folder open on his desk and they went into intense, murmured conversation that I didn’t follow. Lebrun was getting upset again. He snatched at forms, jabbed at scraps of paper with a mechanical pencil, thumped them with his blunt fingers, finally making a harried, explosive noise, scattering the papers with his hand. “I don’t know, I don’t know! Can’t it wait? Can’t you deal with it?”

  “If you want me to,” she said tranquilly, retrieving the papers as she spoke, “but you usually prefer—”

  “Then do it, for God’s sake,” he cried. “Do you have to come to me with every little thing? Don’t I have enough on my mind as it is?” He waved helplessly at the chaos surrounding us.

  Clearly, this kind of tantrum was also something Mrs. Aguilar had been through before. “Fine, I’ll take care of it; I just thought you should know,” she said and waited while he drained his cup in two quick, grimacing swallows, head thrown back for each one, like a man downing a slug of rotgut rye.

  “My God, I have to stop drinking this stuff,” he gasped with a hand pressed to his abdomen. My stomach …”

  Mrs. Aguilar looked at him, eyes narrowed and lips compressed in a way that would have done Miss Doyle proud. “It might help if you followed your doctor’s instructions,” she said.

  “Him, what does he know?” Lebrun said, still making a face. “Oh, hell, wait a minute,” he called wearily after her as she began to leave. “I’ll take care of it, I’ll take care of it. Show me what we have from the Vilas consignment. Excuse me, Mr. Simon.”

  I hurt him ranting and slamming metal file drawers for a minute or two and then he returned, rolling his eyes as he fell back into his chair. “This business. You have no idea. I can’t understand why I don’t have two ulcers. Probably I do. With Marcel gone it’s nothing but one lousy headache after another. I don’t know why I keep on with it. And now, sir, if there’s nothing else …” He looked encouragingly down at my cup, urging me with his eyes to finish and be gone.

  But I had a feeling that I was getting close to something and I didn’t want to leave yet. “Mr. Lebrun, if you have any idea at all why Lily and her father didn’t get along, I’d really appreciate hearing it. Even a guess. Please. I’ve come all the way from New York.”

  He inflated his cheeks—it was as if he had an apple in each one—and slowly let the air out. “Well, you know,” he said uneasily, “Marcel and Odile—Lily’s mother—were not what you’d call a happy couple. Marcel had a roving eye in those days, if you take my meaning. It made for strife in the household. Odile wasn’t one to turn the other cheek. And back then he used to gamble too. Cards, racetracks. He made a good income, but they were always in debt, always running from the butcher, the grocer, the landlord. Maybe that was it.”

  “Maybe,” I said, but of course it wasn’t. Sure, it might explain why Vercier wasn’t at the top of Lily’s list of favorite people, but not the rest of it. Not the near-hysterics, and certainly not the pulling-away from me, the running off to God knows where for God knows how long.

  Lebrun stood up. “Truly, that’s all I can think of, and now I must get back to work.”

  I got up as well, not seeing any choice, but gave it one more stab. “Sir, what do you think was on that film?

  “I told you, I don’t—”

  “I know you don’t. But you said you asked him a hundred times. Didn’t he ever say anything at all?”

  He started to say no, but then, with obvious misgiving, changed his mind. “Yes, once,” he said gravely. “A single word. ‘Security’.”

  “Security?”

  Lebrun nodded sadly. “That’s what he said. ‘Security’.”

  “What do you think he meant?”

  He hesitated, aimlessly shifting some of the clutter on his desk while noisily breathing in and out and then, to my surprise, sank back into his chair. I sat as well, but I was on the very edge of my seat. Here it comes, I thought. Whatever it is.

  “I may as well tell you,” he said, toying with the mechanical pencil, no longer looking at me. “At the end of the war, there was some … trouble with the Liberation authorities—the so-called authorities. Ever since then, he had been afraid they would find some way to come after him, even here in Spain. And I believe Marcel thought this precious film of his would defend him against that.” He looked keenly at me. “You know what I’m talking about, I think?”

  “No, I don’t.” But I had a pretty good inkling, and it stopped my breath.

  “Marcel had enemies back home, you see—he was never an easy man to like—and when Liberation came, certain … accusations were made against him.” He shrugged. “But you have to understand, the Occupation had lasted five years … five years! Marcel was not the only person who found it necessary to do business with the Germans so that his family could survive.”

  “A collaborator,” I breathed, more to myself than to Lebrun. Marcel Vercier was a collaborator.

  Chapter 9

  I can’t say it came as a shock. It had been in my mind as a possibility from the start, and hearing it confirmed now by Lebrun was more reassuring than anything else. Without my quite knowing it, a part of me had been hoping all along that this was what it was about. I’d feared something worse, something even darker, something that involved Lily directly. But this was better, this explained everything. Of course, it was ridiculous of her to think her father’s guilt was any reflection on her or that it could make any difference in the way I felt about her, for Christ’s sake—ridiculous but completely understandable. That’s the way people are.

  Even now, almost two decades after the war, the French were still tearing at each other over who did what in the Occupation. Firm numbers will always be hard to come by, but it appears that in the purges after the Germans were driven out, Resistance tribunals had executed at least 10,000 of their countrymen, and pronounced death sentences in absentia on thousands of others that had fled. Many more thousands were sent to prison. It was, in many ways, the French Revolution all over again. Long-time neighbors denounced one another. Brothers denounced brothers to the justice tribunals and did it gladly. Was it any wonder that Lily had preferred to think of her collaborationist father as dead all these years, or that her life had seemed to her to come apart at the seams the day he’d come back into it?

  All the same, it was hard to accept her having been so uncertain of me that she’d pile lie on lie on lie to keep the truth away from me. Could she really think that I’d—

  “Yes, a collaborator!” Lebrun shouted. “To you, it’s the worst word in the world, isn’t it? A collaborator! A Quisling! Odious! Despicable! You would never do such a thing, would you?” His head had been withdrawn into his shoulders so that he seemed to have no neck. His face had turned purple in spots.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, taken aback by his vehemence; I certainly didn’t want the guy having apoplexy on me. “I only meant—” But I didn’t know what I’d meant. I’d been thinking about Lily anyway, not Vercier, and not the living hell that Occupied France must have been. “All I—”

  Lebrun steamrolled over me. “You Americans,” he huffed bitterly, “so righteous, so sanctimonious, oh, it’s wonderful. But when was the last time foreign troops set foot uninvited on your soil? I’ll tell you when; almost two hundred years ago. You’ve never lived under an occupier, and neither has your father or your father’s father or your father’s father; you don’t know what you’re talking about; you know nothing! You come over here, and you—and you—” He stopped, having run out either of words or of breath.

  He’d gotten under my skin with that lip-curling “you Americans,” but how could I argue with what he’d said? Vercier had been through it. So had Lebrun and millions of other Frenchmen. All I ever saw of the German military machine was from four miles up.

  “Look, I wasn’t making any moral observations. You’re right, I wasn’t there. I’m not condemning anyone.”

  That seemed to calm him down. With his eyes closed he waved a hand, signifying the end of the tirade. “Forgive me. I have strong feelings. We all do. It’s only that—”

  He collected himself a little more and took a slow, deep breath. The dark streaks of color faded from his face, leaving a few pink smears on his throat, like finger marks. “What a strange thing it is. What if he had been a barber? Would anyone have expected him to refuse to cut the hair of a Gestapo corporal who came to his shop? Of course not, unless he wanted to commit suicide. And if he’d been a grocer he would have sold cabbages and radishes to the Boches when they came to buy. The same if he owned a restaurant or ran a laundry. And no one would have criticized him for it. We all did it, what choice was there? You couldn’t live without compromising.”

  “Then why was he in trouble?”

  “Why? Because Marcel sold antiques, fine antiques, not groceries. That was his crime. He sold them before the Occupation, and he sold them during the Occupation, and you don’t sell sixteenth-century silver salt cellars to corporals, you sell them to colonels and generals. That was what was so unforgivable. He had to deal, not with the underlings, but with the military commandant of the entire region, and with the chief of the Gestapo. In the eyes of many people, that made him a collaborationist in a way that selling a bunch of carrots to a twenty-year-old private wouldn’t have, but I ask you: what is the essential difference?”

  “I don’t know,” I said truthfully.

  “And I ask you again, what choice did he have? When a Gestapo Sturmbahnführer walked into his shop and wanted to buy something, do you suppose he could he just say, ‘Thank you very much for the honor, but no thank you, please take your business elsewhere,’ and go about his life? Can you honestly say that you would have done differently than he did?

  No, I couldn’t honestly say that. I shook my head. “And that’s why he left France?”

  “Yes. He ran from them, from his own people, from the French. Some of them were worse than the Nazis had been, more bloodthirsty. There was no way of knowing what might happen if they actually brought him to trial. You have no idea what it was like. People were using the Liberation as an excuse for settling old grudges, and tell me, who doesn’t have enemies? A lot of innocent people went before the firing squads, you can take my word for that. All you had to do was to be suspected, and it was all over, goodbye to you. So when he heard they were after him he ran for the Spanish border, and I don’t blame him.”

  “And came to Barcelona.”

  “Yes, as many others did too. I myself followed not long aft—” He clamped his mouth shut, but the words were already out.

  “For the same reason?” I asked.

  He stiffened. “I was the head of the records department in the municipal office, a responsible job that I’d worked hard to get. I’d been there for three years before the Occupation, and when the Germans came they let me keep my job. I was lucky; where else was I supposed to go? But now I had German bosses and people who were less fortunate began to whisper about me. I don’t blame them. I was far from what you would call well-paid, but others had nothing, and they held it against me. But what was I supposed to do, with a wife and child at home? I did my job the same as I had before, that’s all. But when the Liberation came at last, there were threats. The atmosphere was poisoned; I thought it better to leave before they got around to putting me in front of a tribunal too.”

  He glared at me, his inconsequential chin thrust out as far as it would go: you want to make something out of it? I had no doubt that his rendition of events was blatantly self-serving, but it wasn’t Lebrun’s record that had brought me here.

  “The film,” I said. “How could it possibly have protected him?”

  “The—?” He simmered down when he saw that I wasn’t interested in what he had or hadn’t done during the Occupation. “All I can tell you is what I think. I’ve given it some thought, and here’s my guess: I believe that somehow he’d gotten hold of a German film of some kind that recorded some transaction or agreement, something that implicated one of the tribunal judges, or maybe some high-level official in Veaudry, in some kind of collaboration of his own, and that Marcel had threatened to bring it to light if the charges against him were ever renewed, or if there was a threat of extradition. It was his protection. That’s all I can think of.”

  “Mm.”

  “It would explain what he meant by ‘security,’ wouldn’t it?”

  “It would seem to, yes.”

  “And it would certainly explain why someone might kill him to get it, don’t you think so?”

  “Yes, I guess it would at that.”

  * * *

  Yes, it would, I thought walking back to my hotel, but what it didn’t explain was why Vercier had been so anxious to show it to Lily, and all I was interested in were things that might lead back to her. I didn’t really give a damn about Vercier himself except insofar as he might help me get Lily back.

  Still, coming to Barcelona had been worth it, I supposed. At least now I had some idea of what was going on with her. Her rigid antipathy toward her father was finally comprehensible: he had been a traitor. That wasn’t Lebrun’s version, of course—according to him, Vercier (like himself) had been a blameless victim of circumstances—but I suspected there was plenty more to it than what he’d said to me, and that, whatever it was, Lily had kept it locked up in her all these years, as if the crimes were hers. Guilt by association, by blood. And in her mind, she had long ago declared him dead and buried, something like the way my father’s brother Sol had told him it was his solemn duty to declare me dead—not merely disowned, but literally, officially dead—when I brought Lily back from Europe, a Gentile girl, and married out of the faith. (Dad, in one of his finer moments, had told him to get lost.)

  So when Vercier showed up in the flesh so many years later, the careful structure she’d built up for herself (and for me)—how he’d been a simple barber, how he’d been executed—had imploded; her world had come down around her ears. At first she’d tried putting me off, then she’d told me stories of how he’d abused her, but as events dragged on and Kovalski plodded along on the case she’d known that the truth was bound to come out and I would find out this worst of all things about her: that she was the daughter of that most vile of Frenchmen: a wretched turncoat who had collaborated with the hated Gestapo. And so she’d run away out of shame, and fear, and misplaced guilt.

  Did that make sense, or had I been hanging around Louis too long? But even if it did, I realized unhappily, even if it gave me some much-needed insight into what was happening inside Lily’s head, it didn’t get me any closer to finding her. What if she didn’t come back on her own? How did I locate her? Where did I go from here?

  I got back to my room in a rotten frame of mind, which the hotel itself didn’t help any. The travel agent in Brooklyn had found it for me in his files. Hotel Carlota, the brochure had said. Inexpensive (true), clean (true, more or less), English spoken (true, sort of), and conveniently located only steps from Las Ramblas (well, yes; about eight hundred of them). But what it didn’t say was that the windows looked out on a mean, smelly alley in which gaunt cats skulked among discarded junk and a few parked Vespas double-chained to iron railings, or that the rooms were “lit” with 25-watt light bulbs and furnished with a disreputable bed, a free-standing wardrobe, a cigarette-scarred, round table, a single ashtray, and one wooden chair with a ratty cane seat, all enclosed by four walls coated with two kinds of equally nightmarish “Oriental” wallpaper. All it needed to be a credible place for a couple of gangsters on the lam was a half-empty bottle of booze and some shot glasses on the table and two holstered guns slung over the backs of the chairs. Bathroom down the hall, of course, and up three dark steps, and around the corner.

  Feeling lower than I had since the day she’d left, and worn-out as well, I tossed my coat over a chair and fell on my back onto the bed, planning to spend the next half-hour feeling sorry for myself, for which the room provided the perfect backdrop. But I fell asleep instead, and, to my surprise, slept heavily for almost four hours, waking up in the same position in which I’d lain down. I sat up feeling a little groggy but better for having slept, and the first thing I did when my brain was functioning again was to figure out the time in New York. If it was 3:20 in the afternoon here, that made it 9:20 in the morning there, and that meant I could call the Gianinis to see if there’d been any mail from Lily the day before. Or even today, if the delivery had been on the early side.